I love Time Machine in Leopard. Well, I used to love it until this weekend, anyway, when a pop-up error unceremoniously let me know that it had not backed up my hard drive for the last 21 days. Yep, 3 whole weeks without a back-up and Time Machine only deigned to let me know now. What an arrogant, pig-headed little sneak.

I wouldn’t call myself a back-up freak. I like to ensure I have a back-up of my hard drive’s contents and I was ecstatic to learn that Leopard would make it a no-brainer activity that didn’t require any input from me. I stood in line on release day to get Leopard right away, did a clean install of it as soon as I got home, and did a happy Mac dance (which involves an odd sort of humming as well, by the way) afterward.

Fast-forward to the present where, after delving into troubleshooting mode after the oh-so-timely warning I received, Time Machine stays in “Preparing” mode forever and never gets to start a back-up. So far, I’ve employed basic trouble-shooting tactics, such as repairing permissions, connecting the external hard drive to my Mac (it normally stays attached to my Airport Extreme Base Station) and using Disk Utility to repair it. However, this has had no effect yet and Time Machine isn’t working still. I’m going to have to roll up my sleeves and dig a little deeper and I may need to just re-format and re-partition the drive and start over.

If there are any Apple execs or software engineers, or even genies in magic bottles who have a spare wish or two to pitch in reading this, my gripe is this: making Time Machine so simple and invisible that it won’t tell me until 3 weeks have passed that my back-ups aren’t working is NOT GOOD. I know you want everything to “just work” and all that, but for the love of God, tell me a bit sooner so I can try to fix something before it’s too late. Seriously. 3 weeks? That defies all common sense for a feature that’s supposed to save me some teeth gnashing and rending of garments in case my computer goes tits up suddenly.

Bad Apple! Bad!